Every
functional society is based on a system of common understandings about man, the
world, and the common good. Otherwise those who take part in it won’t be able
to cooperate effectively in the network of complex, enduring, and sometimes
very demanding undertakings through which they carry on the life of the
society.

Such
understandings can exist even though they aren’t held by everyone, or in their
entirety by many people at all. It’s only necessary that people who run things
make them basic to how they cooperate, and the people at large go along with
the arrangement. Thus, a secular society doesn’t have to be one in which most
people oppose religion in public life. It just has to be one in which influential
people agree religion doesn’t belong there, and find ways to enforce the
agreement.

In the early ’60s
most people didn’t like the school prayer decisions, which pushed religion out
of the public schools. But the decisions stuck, because people who ran things
liked them, and it’s hard for the people at large to resist what higher-ups
settle on as proper. Since that time the same view of what is proper has meant
a continuing trend toward secularism, and many Catholics have come to view the
resulting kind of society as entirely consistent with their faith. Government
is carried on without reference to religion, but political entanglements are
corrupting, the Church is free to carry out her mission in civil society, and
in any event American public religion was basically Protestant.

So why aren’t
things better now, and why isn’t what we have enough?

The problem
with that view is that principles have their own dynamism. Time puts all things
to the test, and a constitutional arrangement that lasts doesn’t remain a
collection of articles of peace accepted for practical reasons. In Rome, rule
by emperors began as a way of keeping the peace after a century of civil
unrest. As it became established, the emperor became divine, and people were
required to accept his divinity. Here in America government was intended as
rule by the people for their own practical benefit. Even so, Americans soon
began to pay semi-divine honors to the Constitution, Declaration of
Independence, and Founding Fathers, and those honors have since been extended
to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. All public authorities inculcate
such pieties, and people who reject them are effectively excluded from public
life.

The
transition from the practical to the sacred is inevitable. How could the
emperor be relied on to keep the peace if he was just some guy and wasn’t
surrounded by a divine aura? And how could America unite diverse regions and
peoples into a union worthy of the sacrifice of the better part of a million
lives in the Civil War unless it was something transcendently special and
important? Government can’t be just a practical expedient. It has the power of
life and death, and at the level of general principle it is not possible to
treat such issues as a matter of practical expediency. Beyond that, modern
government educates the young, looks after people during life’s troubles, and
feels called upon to transform social attitudes in line with its vision of
justice. How can such activities be divorced from ultimate human concerns?

People are
drawn to what they admire. Those attracted to public life are going to see it
as more than a matter of utilitarian public advantage, and no matter what they
say they’ll see themselves as more than humble public servants. Also, when they
try to lead their fellow citizens they’ll need to appeal to transcendent
principle. Governments must attract allegiance that is strong enough to justify
sacrifice, at times extreme sacrifice, and there has to be something supporting
that. A Memorial Day oration can’t say “these brave men gave their lives that
useful arrangements that ignore our highest concerns might endure.” Nor, in
present-day America, can it say they did it to be true to their ancestors,
kindred, or native soil. To be justified, their sacrifice has to be for a
universal principle that amounts to a religion.

Not long ago
that religion could have a somewhat Christian character that limited the
divinity of the state. Churchill and Roosevelt could speak of the Second World
War as a war for Christian civilization. Jefferson and Lincoln might get
temples, but there were inscriptions in the temples that invoked Almighty God
as the Judge of Nations. Today there is no god higher than Caesar, and Caesar
has identified himself with the principle of individual choice and thus with
the divinity of the individual will.

The result is
that secular liberalism has become not semi-divine, like the original
Constitution, but wholly so. As such, it insists on sacred principles, like the
supremacy of individual choice subject only to the demands of the liberal
system itself, that are at odds with traditional religion of any kind. The
result is that secular liberalism eventually feels compelled to drive
traditional religion out of social life as oppressive. The freedom of the
Church, which Catholics understand to have strong social and public dimensions,
is cut back to freedom of worship, an aspect of the right to privacy.

So what do we
do, if we view man as social and Catholicism as a system of truths to live by?

There are
several possibilities. We can try to prevent the further consolidation of
secular liberalism as an established and intolerant religion. We can become
once again a Church of the catacombs, carrying on our activities in strict
privacy. Or we can try to establish some religious outlook more favorable to
Catholicism, if possible Catholicism itself, as authoritative in public life.

The first
choice is the obvious mainstream one. It’s the one the bishops make when they
emphasize the broad interpretation the principle of religious liberty has
traditionally received in America. An advantage of the approach is that it can
appeal to the common justification of secular liberalism as a practical
arrangement rather than a matter of ultimate belief, so it’s easy to argue for.
Still, it has an air of unreality about it, since no one really cares about
abstract freedom when sacred principles are at stake. And worse, it leaves secular
liberalism as the highest public principle, even for Catholics, and we
have seen where that leads.

The second
choice, the Church of the catacombs, is what seems to remain if we lose on the
first. It too has problems, if only because secular liberalism is so
imperialistic. A system that feels called upon to reform family life, and to
that end makes it an
international human rights problem when Belarus recognizes Mothers’ Day, or
Slovenia has only 30 percent of its children in daycare, may not always
tolerate meetings in the catacombs. Why, for example, should it allow
organizations to meet even in private that
tell children that homosexuals are objectively disordered?

So it seems our ultimate goal has to be the
last, the creation of a more Christian and eventually a Catholic society. Every
society has a religion, or a system that functions as such, so why not go for
more truth rather than less? The ultimate goal of a Catholic society may not be
immediately practical, since it is likely to be a long time before movers and
shakers agree that Catholic principles help them do what they want to do and
agree on them as principles of cooperation. Nonetheless, a goal is needed to
focus thought, and Dignitatis
Humanae tells us that the moral duty of societies toward Christ and his
Church is the same now as ever. Since that is so, why not keep our thoughts
straight by making that duty part of our outlook? Practical choices among
imperfect alternatives are often quite difficult, but they are likely to be
made more sensibly if we keep in mind what is ultimately right.

About the Author

James Kalb

James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command (ISI Books, 2008).

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